Eleanor of Aquitaine

1122
Bordeaux or Belin, France

1204
Anjou, France

Queen of France and England

"Powerful, beautiful, indefatigable [unstoppable], sensuous [appealing to the senses], literary, an eagle soaring above mere mortals, mother of ten royal children she might indeed be. Some regarded her as the Demon mother who had once, in a bath, assumed the shape of a dragon."

—James Reston Jr., Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade.

Eleanor of Aquitaine was one of the most powerful and interesting people of the Middle Ages. That she accomplished so much at a time when women usually had little standing (power) in society is amazing. The wife of two kings, she gave birth to three more. Called the "grandmother of Europe" for all the royal lines she started or marriages she arranged, Eleanor was more than simply the power behind the throne. A duchess, or ruler, of the wealthy region of Aquitaine in southern France, Eleanor controlled a huge amount of land. She created a royal court at Poitiers, France, that sponsored such arts as music and poetry.

As queen she counseled her husbands and at times went to war against them. She was not the sort of woman to let fate control her. Instead, she gladly bid farewell to her ill-matched first husband, the king of France, and went head to head with her second husband, the fiery king of England. She helped raise armies for the Second Crusade (1147–49) and went along herself, dressed for battle. Eleanor lived a long and active life, traveling throughout Europe when it was more common for noblewomen to be hidden away in their castles. Though she lived in the twelfth century, she would also have fit in well in the twenty-first century.

An Aquitaine Heiress

Eleanor was born in 1122 in either Bordeaux or Belin, in southern France. She was the granddaughter of William IX of Aquitaine (1070–1127), a Crusader in the Holy Land during the First Crusade (1095–99), a religious war to free Jerusalem and the holy sites associated with Jesus from Islamic occupation. William brought back romantic tales of fighting and love in the Holy Land, which he set to verse and music. Among the first troubadours, or medieval noble poets of Europe, he ruled one of the most powerful and richest regions of France. During his lifetime, however, William IX paid more attention to the ladies and poetry than he did to keeping his duchy (region) intact. He went through two wives and finally took up with a married woman, whose daughter he married off to his own son, also named William. Upon the death of his father, William X (Eleanor's father) took over Aquitaine. His court was a very sophisticated (learned and cultured) one, where poets were sponsored, or encouraged to compose verse, and the idea of courtly, or polite, love for the ideal woman took hold. Eleanor was five when her father became duke of Aquitaine; she was his oldest child, and after the death of a brother, stood to inherit the duchy.

Eleanor was educated not only in poetry but also in the world of politics, for she would soon become the duchess. She went everywhere with her father, learning at his side. This childhood came to a sudden end in 1137 when William X died of food poisoning while he was making a pilgrimage (visit) to a European religious site. But William had already made plans for Eleanor that would take effect after his death. He knew the powerless status of a woman, and so he had his daughter put in the care of the French king Louis VI, or Louis the Fat. This king, who did not want to see the powerful lands of Aquitaine lost to France, immediately married Eleanor to his son and successor, Louis VII. This future king of France, however, had not been trained for royal duty. Before his older brother, Philip, was killed, Louis VII was planning to adopt a religious life. The strong-willed Eleanor and the stuffy, less active Louis were not a great match. The important thing at the time, however, was that Eleanor brought with her to the marriage the large region of Aquitaine.

Queen of France

In 1137 the couple had barely returned from their honeymoon when Louis the Fat died. Eleanor, who was only fifteen at the time, had in the space of one year become an orphan, the duchess of Aquitaine, a married woman, and the queen of France. Close to him in age yet more worldly than Louis, Eleanor became a powerful queen, advising her husband on political and religious matters. She ran into trouble with the church authorities when she pushed through her younger sister's marriage to an already married man. Eleanor talked Louis into backing her in this effort, and soon she had to deal with the powerful religious writer and preacher Bernard of Clairvaux (see entry), who opposed her. It was not until 1145 that Eleanor finally made peace with the church. That year she gave birth to her first child, a daughter she named Marie. Louis, however, had wanted a son to inherit the crown.

About this time, the Middle East forces of Islam were on the march against the Crusader states that had been set up after the First Crusade (1095–99). The powerful Turkish Muslim leader Zengi captured the Crusader city of Edessa in 1144. It was only a matter of time before the Muslims marched on Jerusalem itself. The current pope, Eugenius III, and Bernard of Clairvaux both preached a new Crusade, and Eleanor and Louis, having just patched things up with the church, answered the call. When the leaders of France gathered in the church at Vézelay in 1146 to listen to Bernard call for a new holy war, she knelt with the other nobles and knights and promised that they would fight the Muslims. For Eleanor this was not a matter of staying at home and waiting for her king to return. Instead, she gathered an army of three hundred noblewomen to join the men. Dressed in armor and riding horses, these women planned to take care of the wounded.

The Second Crusade got off to a miserable start. Despite his large army of twenty thousand soldiers, the German king Conrad III was quickly defeated by the Turks and lost most of his men. The French did not do much better, finally reaching the Crusader state of Antioch, where Eleanor's uncle, Raymond, ruled. This uncle, only a few years older than Eleanor, was a handsome, vital man, unlike Eleanor's husband. She openly complained about the king of France, protesting that although she thought she was marrying a man, what she got was a monk. Raymond was no monk. Soon rumors spread that the uncle and niece were romantically involved. When Raymond asked the French king to help him strike at the Muslims in their center of Aleppo, in Syria, and then retake Edessa, Louis refused, instead deciding to head straight for Jerusalem.

The Missing King

Unlike the First Crusade, a king, a queen, and an emperor actually took part in the Second Crusade. There was one person, however, who failed to show up for the Second Crusade. The legendary King Prester John supposedly tried to come to the aid of the Christians in the Holy Land but was unable to ford, or cross, the Tigris River with his army. Legend has it that he then took his army north because he had heard that the river froze in winter, and he and his troops could thus reach the other side by marching across the ice. He waited for several years, but no ice appeared. The weather was too warm, and his men began to die of fever in this strange climate. Finally, he had to return home to his kingdom, located somewhere in those regions of Asia not yet explored by westerners. Such, at any rate, was the tale told by Otto, bishop of Friesing, in 1145. Otto, in turn, had heard this story from others. It was the beginning of the tale of Prester John, who soon took on mythical importance in the West.

John was supposedly a Christian priest who ruled an enormously wealthy empire in Asia or perhaps Africa. His name appears in many forms: Priest John, Priester John, Presbyter John, and other similar-sounding titles. According to the stories that formed around him, he was an offspring of one of the Three Magi, or holy men, who brought gifts to Jesus when he was born. His distant kingdom had so many riches that, according to one version of the tale, he carried a solid-gold scepter (staff). According to another version, this same staff was carved from a large emerald. His was supposed to be the perfect Christian kingdom, and his people or subjects dearly loved Prester John, the perfect king. Unfortunately, he was unable to come to the aid of the Christians in the Second Crusade through no fault of his own. Thus the Crusaders had to go it alone. In the popular imagination the absence of this great Christian king explained the defeat of the Crusader army. Be that as it may, it was a convenient excuse at the time; many scholars have suggested that Prester John was invented to explain the terrible defeat of the Christian armies at the hands of the Muslims during the Second Crusade.

The legend of Prester John took on a life of its own, remaining in the minds of Europeans for several centuries. Letters addressed to the pope, supposedly from Prester John, even arrived in Rome, and the pope is said to have written back. Others claim that Prester John was actually a fictitious, or imaginary, combination of several real kings. Later, when the Mongols began moving out of Asia and attacking Islamic territories in the Middle East, Europeans thought these armies might be Prester John's Christians come to settle a score with the Muslims. By the fourteenth century Prester John's mythical kingdom had moved to Africa. Some maps even located it in present-day Ethiopia. Ironically, these tall tales of Prester John led some Europeans, like the explorer Marco Polo (c. 1254–1324), to develop an interest in Asia and attempt to make contact with the people living there.

When Eleanor learned of this refusal, she sided with her uncle against her husband and even began talking of leaving the king. She told Louis that she was going to stay in Antioch, but in the end the king kidnapped her and had her taken to Jerusalem. This was the beginning of the end of their marriage. Meanwhile, Crusader armies struck at Damascus, in Syria, where they were defeated. In 1149 Louis stayed in Jerusalem long enough to fight a bit and celebrate Easter, after which he and Eleanor sailed home to France on separate ships. Once again the couple tried to have a son, but when a second girl was born, the marriage was all but over. There was no such thing as divorce in the Middle Ages. Instead, Eleanor claimed that her bloodline and Louis's were too close, and in 1152 she had the marriage annulled, or officially cancelled, by the church. Two months later she remarried.

Queen of England

This time Eleanor married a much younger man known for his fiery and manly character. Henry Plantagenet, duke of Anjou, was eleven years younger than Eleanor and stood in line to inherit the English throne. To him, Eleanor, with her vast lands in Aquitaine, was a real prize despite their age difference. When Stephen, the current king of England, died in 1154, Henry became Henry II, king of England, and Eleanor was his queen. Thanks to his wife's land, Henry owned more of France than the king of France himself. Together Henry and Eleanor controlled the most powerful kingdom in the Christian West.

At first Eleanor and Henry were inseparable. She traveled with him throughout his lands, living much of the time in less-than-elegant conditions. In thirteen years she gave birth to eight children, five of them boys. But her husband soon showed that he could not be faithful, and his string of lovers and mistresses ruined their marriage. Eleanor left England in 1168 to return to her native Aquitaine, taking her favorite son, Richard I, the Lionheart (see entry), with her. There she turned away from politics for a time, enjoying the culture offered at her court. It is said that she was the originator, or founder, of what became known as "courts of love," where noblewomen would gather to judge the love poems recited by knights and other male nobles of the duchy.

Court life, however, was not enough to keep Eleanor's interest. She managed to persuade her absent husband to announce that his eldest son, who was also called Henry, would be the next king. He was crowned Henry III in 1170, though the father still held all the power. After three years, however, this son, his brother Richard I, and a third son named Geoffrey grew restless. Eleanor took their side against their father, and with the help of the French king they rose up against Henry II. The king of England quickly crushed this revolt and imprisoned his rebellious wife in various castles for the next sixteen years. These were hard times for Eleanor, who was used to being out in the world, traveling across Europe and even to the Holy Land. She survived this imprisonment, however, and was let go following the death of her husband in 1189. As Henry III had also died by this time, the crown went to Richard I, who freed his mother from her confinement. It was she, in fact, who arranged the celebrations for his coronation (crowning) in London.

During Richard's reign, Eleanor once again became a close adviser to a king. On his way home after fighting in the Third Crusade (1189–92) he was thrown in prison by his political rival, the Holy Roman Emperor. Eleanor managed to keep the kingdom together and fight off attempts by her youngest son, John, to steal the crown. She also arranged for the enormous ransom (payment for release of a prisoner) to be paid to the Holy Roman Emperor to free her son and personally delivered the money to Germany. When Richard I died suddenly in 1199, she stood behind her son John in the fight for the crown. He became king, although not a very good or kind one, yet Eleanor remained loyal to him. In her seventies she continued traveling around Europe arranging royal marriages. In her eighties she finally decided that it was time to slow down. She went to live at an abbey (religious institution for women) at Fontevrault, in the French region of Anjou, where she died in the spring of 1204. She was eighty-two, a very old age for a person living during the Middle Ages.

Eleanor of Aquitaine was a woman far ahead of her time. She was not content simply to be the power behind her man. Instead, she took control herself, helping to recruit forces for the Second Crusade and to install her sons as kings of England. Much of the blame for the failure of the Second Crusade was put on her because of the huge supply train she needed for her three hundred female Crusaders. In reality, it was the infighting among the leaders of this Crusade, as well as poor planning, that were responsible for the failure. Eleanor went on to live a life full of adventure and personal sadness, outliving most of her children. A patron, or sponsor, of the arts as well as a powerful and beautiful woman, Eleanor was an early example of what women could accomplish in the world.

For More Information

Books

"Eleanor of Aquitaine." In Historic World Leaders. Europe: A–K. Edited by Anne Commire and Deborah Klezmer. Detroit, MI: Gale, 1994.

Gregory, Kristiana Eleanor: Crown Jewel of Aquitaine. New York: Scholastic, 2002.

Meade, Marion. Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Biography. New York: Hawthorn, 1977.

Owen, D. D. R. Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen and Legend. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993.

Pernoud, Régine. Eleanor of Aquitaine. Translated by Peter Wiles. London: Collins, 1967.

Reston, James Jr. Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in theThird Crusade. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

Seward, Desmond. Eleanor of Aquitaine. New York: Times Books, 1979.

Weir, Allison. Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life. New York: Ballantine Books, 2001.

Web Sites

"Eleanor of Aquitaine, 1122–1204." French-at-a-Touch.com.http://www.french-at-a-touch.com/French_History/eleanor_of_aquitaine.htm (accessed on June 24, 2004).

"Eleanor of Aquitaine." Notable Women Ancestors.http://www.rootsweb.com/~wa/aquit.html (accessed on June 24, 2004).

"Eleanor of Aquitaine." Women in World History.http://www.womeninworldhistory.com/heroine2.html (accessed on June 24, 2004).

"Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Troubadour's Daughter." The World of Royaltyhttp://www.royalty.nu/Europe/England/Angevin/Eleanor.html (accessed on June 24, 2004).

"Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine." Sherwood Times.http://www.times1190.freeserve.co.uk/eleanor.htm (accessed on June 24, 2004).

"The Second Crusade." The ORB: On-line Reference Book for Medieval Studies.http://the-orb.net/textbooks/crusade/secondcru.html (accessed on April 24, 2004).